China watchIslamic World “Actively Collaborating” with China's Global Campaign against Uyghurs: Researchers
A new report documents how governments — predominantly from Muslim-majority countries across the Middle East and Asia — have cooperated with Beijing to surveil, detain, and repatriate Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities from China who have fled Xinjiang.
In 1997, the government of Pakistan deported 14 Uyghurs accused by Beijing of being terrorists plotting to split Xinjiang, China’s heavily Muslim western province, away from the rest of the country. Upon being driven across Pakistan’s eastern border with China, they were summarily executed.
That case represents the first documented episode of Uyghurs being extradited at China’s request, “marking a watershed in the evolution of Chinese transnational repression,” according to the China’s Transnational Repression of Uyghurs Dataset, a new database and report that was launched on 24 June. It examines 1,546 cases of detention and deportation across 28 countries, from the 1997 incident until March 2021.
The data set, which is a joint initiative by the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs and the Uyghur Human Rights Project, shows how China’s campaign against the Uyghurs has gone global, rapidly expanding from Central and South Asia to include Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
The report, which claims to be the most complete account of China’s international campaign, documents how governments — predominantly from Muslim-majority countries across the Middle East and Asia — have cooperated with Beijing to surveil, detain, and repatriate Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities from China who have fled Xinjiang.
“There has been a lot of criticism against Muslim majority countries for their silence on Xinjiang and the repression of the Uyghurs,” Bradley Jardine, the director of research at the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs and the report’s lead author, told RFE/RL. “But this database shows that it isn’t just hypocrisy from the Islamic world, it’s active collaboration with China.”
United Nations human rights officials estimate that 1 million or more Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities are detained at camps in a vast Chinese internment system. Many former detainees allege they were subjected to attempted indoctrination, physical abuse, and even sterilization.
The United States government and several Western parliaments have labeled China’s actions in Xinjiang as genocide, but most governments of majority Muslim states — who increasingly have close financial and political ties to Beijing through China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) — have remained silent on the issue.
According to the report, efforts to target Uyghurs and force them back to China have intensified since 2017, when Beijing is believed to have begun its mass internment program in Xinjiang.
